Laurie Clements Lambeth

Laurie Clements Lambeth is an American poet, specializing in the topic of disability. She was raised in Laguna Beach and Palos Verdes, California. She graduated from the University of Houston with an MFA and PhD. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, Indiana Review, Mid-American Review, Seneca Review, and The Iowa Review. She lives in Houston, Texas.

Life Laurie Clements Lambeth was born in Newport Beach, and grew up in places like Laguna Beach, Santa Ynez, and Palos Verdes. She was diagnosed with relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis at seventeen years of age. This event in her life influenced her to become a poet. Lambeth has shared her personal story on the National MS Society Website, where she discusses her disease and its influence on her poetry: "I was diagnosed at the age of 17, so MS has defined much of my adult life. I consider what goes on in my body an important factor of who I am; we are intricately linked, MS and me" . One of her symptoms from her disease is numbness. She explains that "living with numbness opened my perception of what is me and what is outside of me". Lambeth has appeared in many journals during her career, such as The Paris Review, Indiana Review, Mid-American Review, Seneca Review, and The Iowa Review. She has also produced a popular book of poetry entitled Veil and Burn. She has recently appeared in the anthology Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability. She currently lives in Houston, Texas, with her husband and dog, where she works on her poetry and is an avid horsewoman, having ridden and trained horses competitively for many years.

Awards 2006 National Poetry Series Runner-up for Iowa Award in Nonfiction, The Iowa Review Barthelme and Michener fellowships

Works "Retrobulbar", Verse Daily "Symptoms*", Disability Studies Quarterly

Reviews Veil and Burn: From the opening lines of Veil and Burn readers know they are in for something special and not the usual first book of poems. Laurie Clements Lambeth has given us a book of poetry about disability that is at once both searing and sensuous. This in itself may not seem surprising coming from a poet who is the book review editor for the Disability Studies Quarterly, but what one does not necessarily expect is the deftness of the organizational structure.

A simple online search of Laurie Clements Lambeth will bring up the most popular topic that is spoken about her, her novel Veil and Burn. As a writer with a disability her novel is described as being: "Concerned with physical experience, pain, and disability, Veil and Burn illuminates an intense desire to feel through the Other, embrace it, become it, and in the transformation, to understand the suffering body. In poems about animals, artifacts, and monsters, Lambeth displays a fascination for all bodies while exploring their pain, common fate, alienation, and abilities. Hovering between poem and prose fragment, between the self and fellow creatures, Laurie Clements Lambeth celebrates physical sensation, imbuing it with lyric shape, however broken, however imprisoned the shape may be." Her poetry is very much involved with her disability and what it "celebrates". Her view of a subject being "melodramatic" shows that Lambeth does not see her disability as something about which to be overly dramatic. Much of her work deals with the symptoms and sensations that MS has brought her. Veil and Burn is also supposed to be an unraveling of what MS does to her body's functioning. It "is not an ode to false hope, a cheery eyeing of her place in heaven, or a Spartan vow to overcome. It is a clear-eyed seeing of the worth of the material world". Lambeth explains that she has experienced a deepened sense of disability since she has been writing about it in her poetry. For her, this process sets something undesirable aside, so that she can "investigate it, sculpt it, and create something outside of my body that is vividly physical, in subject and in form".